PHILADELPHIA — Brett Brown’s point guard has never played an NBA game. His best player doesn’t have his position. His showpiece rookie is injured. One of his players won’t fly to games.

What? Is this the first time he has had a basketball team that seemed overmatched? Wasn’t that him, in England in 2012, trying to coach the Australian Boomers in the Olympics? And didn’t they have a winning record, 3-2, with something less than a dream team?

“I coached eight bartenders, and I loved them,” Brown was saying Wednesday, as his first training camp as the 76ers’ head coach neared. “We knew we weren’t going to beat anyone with talent. But they were great. They played with physicality. They played defense. And we had to have a tremendous chemistry, nature. Those are the core cornerstones of the program.

“In Philadelphia, it’s the same thing.”

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In Philadelphia, the bartenders don’t bang the glass to help the Sixers win, they slam the glasses down when they lose, and last season they lost 48 times. But Brown knows that, and he will show up at St. Joe’s for camp this weekend anyway, his hands on his hips, a four-year guaranteed contract in his hip pocket.

He isn’t expecting to win a championship, even though he knows how, having spent six years as an assistant in San Antonio. That includes the last one, when the Spurs were still expecting a championship seven games into the finals. But Brown is not planning some warped retreat toward a more premium draft choice, either. Instead, he will demand his players to be fit, truly fit, measurably fit, fit enough to compete early, fit enough to still be running in the spring. “An holistic approach,” to basketball-team building, he said. Hey, St. John’s wort for all.

True story: Brown actually spoke more Wednesday about the rolls of his players’ skin than about their rolls to the basket after nicely set screens. The last time the Sixers had someone in authority with such a demand for physical wellness, it was Pat Croce, a fitness trainer turned celebrity owner. And even if Allen Iverson never listened, the Sixers did wind up playing for a championship, if that helps.

But Brown is a long way from that — years away, another contract away probably, for it may have been easier to seek a gold medal in London with Foster’s-pourers than it will be to contend with his keg of NBA Lite. So, he will begin slowly, first demanding low body fat, better stamina and firmer muscles. Then he might work in a foul-shooting drill or two.

It’s a plan, and until Royce White will return his airplane seat to an upright and locked position, Evan Turner has a regular position, and Michael Carter-Williams rolls a few times around the league, it’s as good as any. But then what? What happens after the Sixers dominate the next sports-magazine body issue? When does the holistic approach end and the traffic-dunk approach begin trending?

“I don’t know how to answer to that,” Brown said. “People don’t know how hard it is to be the last man standing. It is really, really hard. And every time I have gone through one of those, you just look back and think, ‘My goodness, to continue to be playing in the middle of June …’ We have been used to stopping in April in Philadelphia. It’s hard to continue to play. The mindset, the physicality, the bigness, the luck that you need to play at that time of year is a lesson in itself. And it always gets down to the hardness of the competitor, the people, the luck. Geez, that takes time.

“But I feel like we are not skipping steps. We are not cheating the system. We are going about it like we are intent on building something. That’s why they hired me. That’s what I said I was going to do. And that is what I intend on trying to do.”

He has four years on his deal, a playbook, a weight room, a student of basketball analytics as his GM, some good players and low expectations. He’s seen worse.